[FoxNews] A young Tennessee mother, 19, has received two years’ probation for putting her 8-month-old baby in a freezer while allegedly under the influence, then closing the lid, according to a report.

[TimesOfSanDiego] Authorities Wednesday publicly identified a 23-year-old Riverside County man who opened fire on Customs and Border Protection personnel during a human-smuggling attempt at San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Travis James Eckstein of Beaumont died at the scene of Monday evening’s shootout at the international border crossing, according to San Diego Police.

The events that led to the deadly gunfire began about 7:45 p.m., when Eckstein refused to stop for CBP officers after driving out of Mexico into a secondary inspection area at the port facility, SDPD Lt. Matt Dobbs said.

As the federal personnel tried to stop Eckstein, his white truck wound up blocked by another vehicle. He then allegedly began firing a gun toward some of the federal agents, getting out of his pickup while continuing to shoot. Seven officers returned fire, mortally wounding him.

Customs personnel performed CPR on Eckstein until paramedics took over the unsuccessful lifesaving attempts, Dobbs said.

None of the federal personnel were injured.

Concealed in the back of Eckstein’s truck, officials found a pair of Chinese nationals, ages 18 and 27, with no legal status to enter the United States, according to CBP public affairs. The two men, who were unhurt, were interviewed and turned over to customs officers.

Northbound vehicle and pedestrian operations at the port of entry were suspended for about 30 minutes due to the shooting.

San Diego Police homicide detectives were called in to investigate the case, as is standard in all shootings involving law enforcement officers in the city.

[FOX] NEW YORK CITY – A deputy chief with the New York Police Department died Wednesday after he shot himself, a police spokesman told Fox News.

The NYPD confirmed to Fox News that Deputy Chief Steven Silks, executive officer of Patrol Borough Queens North, was the department veteran who died. The 62-year-old deputy chief had been with the police department for over 38 years, police Sgt. Lee Jones said.

Sources told the New York Post that the officer, who was a month away from retirement, had been sitting in an unmarked patrol car when he shot himself in the head, but police would not confirm it.

[Defense One] Scientists looking anew at a 2017 North Korean nuclear test discovered that the explosion was likely about two-thirds more powerful than U.S. officials previously thought.

Earlier data put the yield somewhere between 30 and 300 kilotons; the U.S. intelligence community said 140 kilotons. That was already the most powerful device tested by North Korea, topping a 2016 test by about an order of magnitude. But a new look at seismological data suggests that the blast was between 148 and 328 kilotons, and probably around 250 kilotons.

Elysian Fields. A hapless chump
Was driving past the City Dump
When suddenly he heard the curse
Of a person more diverse.
A "F-ck!," a truck, and beaucoup clanks.
Nebraska man peeked through the planks.
Like all Caucasians, choked with hate,
He chuckled... but the balky gate --
Upon which swung his very fate! --
Was freed at last: The way made straight!
He jumped the fence to shake the hand
Of that ingenious garbageman
Who all unwittingly had taught him
To put the hinge down at the bottom.

O engineer of sanitation,
Long before the big invasion
Your chariot of inspiration
Saved this great ungrateful nation,
Dumping junk and chunks of chickens,
Thus assisting Andrew Higgins.

For that you ought to get some credit
Though I doubt you'll ever get it...
But just in case, I penned this doggerel
For Obama's next inaugural.

Nice story, but I'm posting because he was my Civics teacher at my Jr. HS in Chula Vista. Great stories and a strong man. A genuinely good man

It’s even better when there’s a personal connection.

[10 News San Diego] For most people, a summer trip to France is a chance to relax in beautiful surroundings and to savor the country's fine food. For Tom Rice of San Diego, it's an opportunity to relive the time he nearly died jumping from a C-47 Douglas airplane, then was shot at, again and again.

Despite being 97, Rice climbed once more into the bone-rattling fuselage of a C-47 and, while flying over the Normandy fields where he first saw action in 1944, leaped into the unknown.

Those on the ground watched the anxiety-inducing descent as, strapped to another parachutist dangling beneath a stars and stripes canopy, the old man coasted through the sky, another gigantic American flag billowing out behind him.

Reaching the ground with only a slight stumble on impact, Rice proudly gave V for victory signs with his hands and, wearing a 101st Airborne baseball cap, said he felt "great" and was ready to "go back up and do it again."

Rice, along with thousands of other, was in Normandy to mark the anniversary of the June 6 D-Day military operations that 75 years ago saw Allied forces turn the tide of World War II toward eventual defeat for Nazi Germany.

Most participants were content with touring some of the broad landing beaches -- with code names like Juno, Gold and Omaha -- that saw legions of young men wade ashore into a barrage of German machine gun and artillery fire to push back German advances.

[FoxNews] The Latest on the arrest on child rape charges of Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of the La Luz del Mundo church (all times local):

6 P.M.
An attorney for the leader of a Mexico-based evangelical church says his client's $50 million bail on charges of child rape and human trafficking is "outrageous" and unreasonable.

No pleas were entered Wednesday at a hearing for Naasón Joaquín García, the head of La Luz del Mundo, and two followers in Los Angeles. The judge left García's bail at $50 million and ordered them back to court Monday for arraignment.

García's bail had been raised from $25 million to $50 million Tuesday after investigators completed more search warrants.

García answered the judge's questions through a Spanish interpreter while his co-defendants responded softly in English.

His family waved to him as he was being led out of the courtroom before a bailiff admonished them. About two dozen family members and congregants came to the hearing.

[Wired] IN 2014, A graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier—a largely forgotten result that supported a powerful suspicion about fundamental physics and its relationship to pure math.

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions.”

As numbers go, the familiar real numbers—those found on the number line, like 1, π and -83.777—just get things started. Real numbers can be paired up in a particular way to form “complex numbers,” first studied in 16th-century Italy, that behave like coordinates on a 2-D plane. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing is like translating and rotating positions around the plane. Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space.

There the game stops. Proof surfaced in 1898 that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these “division algebras” would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe?

“Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,” Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of Florida, said in an email.

#1
Quaternions, Octonions and Sedenions as the underlying structural math of the universe have long featured in ancient Indian vedic mathematics. Too bad most of it was suppressed for 700 years under muslim cultural domination. Then the Brits came and told us, 'anything you know is shite anyway you grass eating rag-heads!' Today, this must sound like news to current academics.

#8
The every eleven years solar minimum is the basic model. However, periodically there is an extended minimum — y’all will remember the Little Ice Age, while the more technical are thinking about the Maunder Minimum while hoping for something more Dalton-like ...

#10
Two interesting things about Dr. Zharkova's work:
1) it is based on a statistical analysis of solar activity, NOT the predictions of a computer model.
2) Rather than predicting generic gloom and doom that *could* happen in the future, she makes a specific, testable prediction - that the next few years will be very cold. As she says, we will see if she is right.

As tw points out, this is not your usual every 11 years solar minimum but a Big-Ass Solar Minimum, like back when the Thames used to freeze over. It's worth watching Dr. Zharkova's presentation rather than filtering the idea through 'journalism'. No offense to their mums, but when it comes to a grasp of science, most journalists lack opposable thumbs.

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.